Fairly Recently: Must- and Should-Reads, and Writings... (October 31, 2019)
MUST OF THE MUSTS
Comment of the Day: Grizzled in Age of the Expert as Policymaker Is Coming To an End https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/comment-of-the-day-_grizzled_-in-age-of-the-expert-as-policymaker-is-coming-to-an-end-alas-i-dont-think-its-usual.html: 'Alas, I don't think it's usually possible for non-experts to evaluate expert judgements. The Reinhard and Rogoff example is more the exception than the rule. Consider the case of global warming. Google 'Conversion of a Global Warming Skeptic'. This is a case where is took 18 months of work, which was funded so it could be not only full time but assisted, for a Phd in physics to accumulate enough background to become convinced that the climate scientists had been right all along...
Hoisted from the Archives: _Orlando Letelier (1976): The ‘Chicago Boys’ in Chile: Economic Freedom’s Awful Toll: _ https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/orlando-letelier-1976-the-chicago-boys-in-chile-economic-freedoms-awful-toll-hoisted-from-the-archives.html: 'It is nonsensical... that those who inspire, support or finance that economic policy should try to present their advocacy as restricted to “technical consid erations,” while pretending to reject the system of terror it requires to succeed...
Hoisted from the Archives: Contra Raghu Rajan: Economic Stimulus Has Not Failed, It Has Not Been Tried (on a Large Enough Scale) https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/contra-raghu-rajan-economic-stimulus-has-not-failed-it-has-not-been-tried-on-a-large-enough-scale.html: 'Back in 2007 I would have said that every macroeconomist who has done any homework at all believes that coordinated monetary and fiscal expansion together increase at least the flow of nominal GDP. Now comes the very smart Raghu Rajan to say, apparently, not so...
Weekend Reading: Benjamin Wittes: The Collapse of the President’s Defense https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/benjamin-wittes-the-collapse-of-the-presidents-defense-weekend-reading.html: 'It was never a strong defense. After all, Trump himself released the smoking gun early in L’Affaire Ukrainienne when the White House published its memo of Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. That document erased any question as to whether Trump had asked a foreign head of state to “investigate”—a euphemism for digging up dirt on—his political opponents. There was no longer any doubt that he had asked a foreign country to violate the civil liberties of American citizens by way of interfering in the coming presidential campaign. That much we have known for certain for weeks. The clarity of the evidence did not stop the president’s allies from trying to fashion some semblance of defense. But the past few days of damaging testimony have stripped away the remaining fig leaves...
Weekend Reading: Milton Friedman (1982): Free Markets and the Generals https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/milton-friedman-1982-free-markets-and-the-generals-weekend-reading.html: 'Military juntas in other South American countries have been as authoritarian in the economic sphere as they have been in politics.... None, with the exception of Chile, has supported a fully free market economy as a matter of principle. Chile is an economic miracle. Inflation has been cut from 700% a year in mid-1974 to less than 10% a year. After a difficult transition, the economy boomed, growing an aver age of about 8% a year from 1976 to 1980. Real wages and employment rose rapidly and unemployment fell. Imports and exports surged after export subsidies were eliminated and tariffs were slashed to a flat 10% (except for temporarily higher rates for most automobiles)...
Voltaire: The Presbyterians https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/voltaire-the-works-of-voltaire-vol-xix-philosophical-letters: 'Though the Episcopal and Presbyterian sects are the two prevailing ones in Great Britain, yet all others are very welcome to come and settle in it, and they live very sociably together, though most of their preachers hate one another almost as cordially as a Jansenist damns a Jesuit. Take a view of the Royal Exchange in London, a place more venerable than many courts of justice, where the representatives of all nations meet for the benefit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian transact business together, as though they were all of the same religion, and give the name of Infidels to none but bankrupts; there the Presbyterian confides in the Anabaptist, and the Churchman depends upon the Quaker’s word. At the breaking up of this pacific and free assembly, some withdraw to the synagogue, and others to take a glass. This man goes and is baptized in a great tub, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; that man has his son’s foreskin cut off, and causes a set of Hebrew words—to the meaning of which he himself is an utter stranger—to be mumbled over the infant; others retire to their churches, and there wait the inspiration of heaven with their hats on; and all are satisfied. If one religion only were allowed in England, the government would very possibly become arbitrary; if there were but two, the people would cut one another’s throats; but, as there is such a multitude, they all live happy, and in peace...
The fall of the Roman Empire in the west: implications for literature and literary culture: Erich Auerbach: Mimesis: 'Gregory of Tours: "Serious local fighting arose at that time between inhabitants of the region of Tours. For Sicharius, son of the late John, celebrated the feast of the Nativity of Our Lord at the village of Manthelan with Austrighiselus and the other neighbors. And the priest of the place sent a boy over to invite some of the men to come to his house for a drink. When the boy got there, one of those he invited drew his sword and did not refrain from striking at him. He fell down and was dead. Sicharius was friendly with the priest, and when he heard that one of his boys had been murdered, he took his arms and went to the church to wait for Austrighiselus...
But... But... But... There are no hot summer nights in Sausalito!: Wikipedia: Sausalito Summernight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sausalito_Summernight...
Bret Devereaux: War Elephants https://acoup.blog/2019/07/26/collections-war-elephants-part-i-battle-pachyderms/: "Part I (this one) is going to look at how the elephant functioned in battle: how did it work as a weapon-system and why would anyone want to have it? Part II (next week) will then turn and ask the question: if elephants are such awesome weapon systems, why did the Romans defeat and then abandon them (and why did the Chinese never meaningfully adopt them)? Part III (the week after that) turns this question on its head: if elephants were as useless as the Romans thought, why did Indian kings keep using them?...
Wayne E. Lee (2016): Waging War: Conflict, Culture, and Innovation in World History https://books.google.com/?id=hbyYCgAAQBAJ, excerpts: "When in 1996 Lawrence Keeley published War Before Civilization. Keeley made an impassioned plea for reimagining the role of violence in human experience, and he made the striking claim that prestate societies experienced extreme male fatality rates. Keeley's work and additional studies have settled on the somewhat shocking estimates... [that] between 15 and 25% of males and about 5% of females" in human forager societies died from warfare. This per capita rate far exceeds those of later state-based societies. Since Keeley's work, archaeologists and anthropologists have renewed the debate begun by Hobbes and Rousseau. To use the simplest terms, as suggested in a recent review, there are the 'deep rooters', who believe in the long evolutionary history of intergroup violence, and the "inventors", who argue that human conflict emerged more recently because of changes in human social organization...
ProGrowthLiberal: Robert Barro’s Misstated Case for Federal Reserve Independence http://econospeak.blogspot.com/2019/08/barros-misstated-case-for-federal.html: "There are two aspects of his case that strike me as silly to say the least starting with his opening sentence: 'In the early 1980s, the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, was able to choke off runaway inflation because he was afforded the autonomy necessary to implement steep interest-rate hikes.' This statement glosses over the fact that we had a macroeconomic mess in 1982... an ill-advised fiscal stimulus initiated the moment St. Reagan took office.... To be fair–Barro continues his magical history tour in a reasonable way until we get this absurdity: 'One could infer the normal rate from the average federal funds rate over time. Between January 1986 and August 2008, it was 4.9%, and the average inflation rate was 2.5% (based on the deflator for personal consumption expenditure), meaning that the average real rate was 2.4%'.... Barro seems to be saying the long-run real interest rate has been the same for the last 23 years. There has been a lot of research to suggest otherwise...
Bret Devereaux Elephants Against Wolves https://acoup.blog/2019/08/02/collections-war-elephants-part-ii-elephants-against-wolves/: "The playbook for dealing with elephants was actually fairly simple in concept–Vegetius, a later Roman military writer, manages to sum up the ‘best practices’ in less than a paragraph (Vegetius 3.24). Ideally, the elephants should be met by light infantry screening troops, whose freedom of movement allows them to avoid the elephant’s charge. Those light troops – armed with missile weapons (especially javelins, but also slings) should especially target the mahouts, in an effort to panic the elephants. Ideally, a space is left open for the elephants to flee too, although ancient sources are full of examples where they were simply driven back through the enemy formation. The goal isn’t to kill the elephant, but instead to panic the animal and drive it off or–better yet–drive it through the enemy. This latter point is notable: ancient military writer after ancient military writer notes how elephants were often as much a danger to their own troops as to the enemy, especially when wounded or frightened...
Bret Devereaux: Battle Pachyderms https://acoup.blog/2019/07/26/collections-war-elephants-part-i-battle-pachyderms/: "One reading of the (admittedly somewhat poor) evidence suggests that this is how Pyrrhus of Epirus used his elephants–to great effect–against the Romans. It is sometimes argued that Pyrrhus essentially created an ‘articulated phalanx’ using lighter infantry and elephants to cover gaps–effectively joints–in his main heavy pike phalanx line. This allowed his phalanx–normally a relatively inflexible formation–to pivot...
*Ian Dunt *: "Rory Stewart. Let's find out where he's at https://twitter.com/IanDunt/status/1186677364878663680: Ah, maybe a good place. 'My big beg to the House, and here I am speaking to colleagues who voted for Brexit, is let's please in these very very final stages, do it properly. This is your great founding moment. This is your opportunity to create an enormous constitutional change that can last for 40 years. So do it properly.' Stewart valiantly pointing out that he has backed Brexit deals over and over again. 'I'm not a member of this party anymore. I don't get any bonus points. But in return, people deserve scrutiny. This is a hell of a big document. I know they'll be many voices in the Chamber who say we've been talking about this long enough. We cannot think like this. This is our parliament. We cannot do down our parliament. This was an exercise in regaining the sovereignty of parliament. And if it's about regaining the sovereignty of parliament, then treat parliament with respect. If you are taking back control, then show that you are worthy to exercise that control...
Ian Dunt: "Caroline Lucas, Green https://twitter.com/IanDunt/status/1186680346408042498: 'I want to speak out on behalf of those who do not share this govt's vision of a mean-minded little Britain, with our borders closed and our horizons narrowed. For those like me who are proud to stand up for the precious right to be able to work and study and live and love in 27 other countries, who celebrate the contribution made by the 3 million EU citizens in our country. For those who recognise that imperfect thought it undoubtedly is, the EU remains the greatest international venture for peace, prosperity and freedom in history.' Thank f--- for Caroline Lucas, man. Really...
The Berkeley History Department slavery studies group, plus David Blight on Yale, on how much of what we see as "scientific labor management" from the business side and "deskilling Taylorization" from the labor side has its roots in slaveholding society ideas of the worker as an "instrumentum mutum" in the words of Roman statesman Cato the Elder—merely a "tool that speaks": David Blight, Stephanie Jones-Rogers, Caitlin Rosenthal, and Jennifer D. King: The Business of Brutality: Slavery and the Foundations of Capitalism
David Glasner: What’s Wrong with DSGE Models Is Not Representative Agency https://uneasymoney.com/2019/09/16/whats-wrong-with-dsge-models-is-not-representative-agency/: "The completely ad hoc and artificial concept of a representative firm was not well-received by Marshall’s contemporaries.... The young Lionel Robbins... subjected the idea to withering criticism.... James Hartley wrote about the short and unhappy life of Marshall’s Representative Firm in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. One might have thought that the inauspicious career of Marshall’s Representative Firm would have discouraged modern macroeconomists from resurrecting the Representative Firm in the barely disguised form of a Representative Agent in their DSGE models, but the convenience and relative simplicity of solving a DSGE model for a single agent was too enticing to be resisted. Therein lies the difference between the theory of the firm and a macroeconomic theory. The gain in convenience from adopting the Representative Firm was radically reduced by Marshall’s Cambridge students and successors who, without the representative firm, provided a more rigorous, more satisfying and more flexible exposition of the industry supply curve and the corresponding partial-equilibrium analysis than Marshall had with it. Providing no advantages of realism, logical coherence, analytical versatility or heuristic intuition, the Representative Firm was unceremoniously expelled from the polite company of economists. However, as a heuristic device for portraying certain properties of an equilibrium state—whose existence is assumed not derived—even a single representative individual or agent proved to be a serviceable device with which to display the defining first-order conditions, the simultaneous equality of marginal rates of substitution in consumption and production with the marginal rate of substitution at market prices.... An excellent example of this heuristic was provided by Jack Hirshleifer in his 1970 textbook Investment, Interest, and Capital.... Here is how Hirshleifer explained what was going on...
The best thing I have yet seen on how industrial organization, concentration, and monopsony drive the conclusion that increases in the minimum wage do not reduce employment in the United States today—or, rather, for which groups of workers minimum wage increases lower and for which raise employment: José Azar, Emiliano Huet-Vaughn, Ioana Marinescu, Bledi Taska, and Till von Wachter: Minimum Wage Employment Effects and Labor Market Concentration: "Why is the employment effect of the minimum wage frequently found to be close to zero? Theory tells us that when wages are below marginal productivity, as with monopsony, employers are able to increase wages without laying off workers, but systematic evidence directly supporting this explanation is lacking. In this paper, we provide empirical support for the monopsony explanation by studying a key low-wage retail sector and using data on labor market concentration that covers the entirety of the United States with fine spatial variation at the occupation-level. We find that more concentrated labor markets–where wages are more likely to be below marginal productivity–experience significantly more positive employment effects from the minimum wage. While increases in the minimum wage are found to significantly decrease employment of workers in low concentration markets, minimum wage-induced employment changes become less negative as labor concentration increases, and are even estimated to be positive in the most highly concentrated markets. Our findings provide direct empirical evidence supporting the monopsony model as an explanation for the near-zero minimum wage employment effect documented in prior work. They suggest the aggregate minimum wage employment effects estimated thus far in the literature may mask heterogeneity across different levels of labor market concentration...
Alice Dreger: Napoleon Chagnon Is Dead https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/20191023-dreger-chagnon: "The peer-reviewed article I ultimately published in Human Nature about the AAA task force is the angriest academic piece I have ever written.... Tierney had misrepresented so much. The chair of the AAA task force knew it too. That was Jane Hill, former president of the AAA. During my research, Sarah Hrdy shared with me a previously confidential message, dated April 15, 2002, in which Hill responded to Hrdy’s concerns about the task force’s work. 'Burn this message', Hill told Hrdy. 'The book [by Tierney] is just a piece of sleaze, that’s all there is to it (some cosmetic language will be used in the report, but we all agree on that). But I think the AAA had to do something because I really think that the future of work by anthropologists with indigenous peoples in Latin America—with a high potential to do good—was put seriously at risk by its accusations, and silence on the part of the AAA would have been interpreted as either assent or cowardice. Whether we’re doing the right thing will have to be judged by posterity.'... Of course, the failure of facts in the Darkness case extended beyond academe. If The New Yorker and W.W. Norton had done proper fact-checking, so much mischief would have been avoided. Still, the AAA made it all much worse. The AAA could have done what the National Academy of Sciences, the American Society of Human Genetics, the International Genetic Epidemiology Society, and the Society for Visual Anthropology did: looked at the facts and condemned Tierney. Instead, the AAA thanked Tierney 'for his valuable service.' A kangaroo court. A show trial. That’s how many saw the AAA investigation. The AAA membership eventually voted to rescind acceptance of the report. 'It was really amateur hour' at the AAA, Hagen told me...
Matthew Yglesias: Impeachment Protests and Mass Resistance Are Needed to Beat Trump https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/18/20905686/resistance-protest-impeachment-rallies-trump: "Watergate is the ur-text for how Americans imagine the defeat of a sitting president, but it shouldn’t be how to think about the impeachment of Donald Trump.... A lawless government cannot be constrained by the institutions of the law alone. It is popular mass resistance that creates a crisis point and forces action. And if Democrats want to beat Trump’s stonewalling tactics in 2019, they should consider doing it again.... Defeating Nixon... meant winning a series of difficult elite insider games.... Building a consensus that compelled the president to resign was arduous, and the people who did it are rightly proud of their work. But none of this is relevant to contemporary politics, any more than the Senate’s unanimous passage of the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act has relevant lessons for contemporary climate politics. Today’s Congress is much more partisan and much more ideological, featuring many members who have no personal loyalty to Trump but who can nevertheless be expected to stand by him through thick and thin, thanks to broader partisan and policy objectives. In an extraordinary moment, you need to reach beyond ordinary politics.... The mechanisms through which protest works seem multifaceted, with some of the impact driven by direct personal participation, some driven by witnessing the protest themselves, and some driven by media coverage which serves to rebroadcast key elements of the protest message. The key to it all, however, is that bothering to show up to a march is a moderately costly investment of time and energy. When a bunch of people do that, it serves as a powerful signal to the rest of society that something extraordinary is happening.... The Constitution is in need of defending. And it would be extremely foolish to believe that Republican senators and Federalist Society judges are going to come riding out of the woods in order to do the job...
Is this as insane as it looks? @thetomzone: "Sheryl Sandberg https://twitter.com/thetomzone/status/1186821100518432769: "We Let Politicians Lie in Facebook Ads for the "Discourse", Not the Money...
Seán Clarke and Cath Levett: Canada Election 2019 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/22/canada-election-2019-full-results: 'Justin Trudeau defied worst expectations to keep his job as prime minister. His Liberals are again the largest party, but have lost their majority. Find out where the parties are strongest and who were the winners and losers on the night...
MXCity: Mexico City’s Mountains: Every Possible Elevation: 'Mexico City occupies the grand base of a massive bowl formed by the meeting of two mountain ranges... [that] easily reach 5,000 meters.... The Sierra Madre Occidental and... the Sierra Madre Oriental. Mexico City rests at the confluence of the two... [and] the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt... accounts for... a string of volcanoes... across the central part of Mexico.... Mexico City’s mountains aren’t always obvious.... But one day, a friend will invite you to the rooftop patio. Perhaps in the east of the city you’ll discover that Popocatepetl is right there.... In the south, you may see Ajusco. To the north, friendly Cerro del Chiquihuite has been waving to the exodus leaving the city via Indios Verdes for decades. On a clear day, they can be witnessed from almost any area of Mexico City...
That your grandfather Governor John Buchanan campaigned against federal voting rights acts, raised the poll tax, and established pensions for Confederate veterans—that all that goes unmentioned in the context of "I have shared in the emotional damage imposed by discrimination...", "From that day forward I have shared in the emotional damage imposed by discrimination..." and "'fairness' assumed for me a central normative position..." demonstrates either an absolutely stunning lack of self-awareness or a conscious intellectual judo move to distract attention from the racial politics of the white southern establishment: James Buchanan (2009): Karen Ilse Horn, ed, "Roads to Wisdom: Conversations with Ten Nobel Laureates in Economics" https://delong.typepad.com/document.pdf: "What did the Navy teach you?... I experienced overt discrimination for being a non-Easterner, a nonestablishmentarian. In the whole group of 600 boys, there were only about twenty who were graduates of Yale, Harvard, Princeton—all Ivy League. By the end of this first boot camp period, they had to select midshipman officers. Out of the 20 boys from the establishment universities, 12 or 13 were picked, against a background of a total of 600. It was overtly discriminatory towards those of us who were not members of the establishment... James Buchanan (2009): Better than Plowing: "From that day forward I have shared in the emotional damage imposed by discrimination, in any form, and 'fairness' assumed for me a central normative position decades before I came to discuss principles of justice professionally and philosophically...
Jonathan Sallet: Competitive Edge: Five Building Blocks for Antitrust Success: The Forthcoming FTC Competition Report https://equitablegrowth.org/competitive-edge-five-building-blocks-for-antitrust-success-the-forthcoming-ftc-competition-report/: "Here are five building blocks for successful antitrust enforcement that the FTC should embrace in order to, as its Chairman Joseph Simons said (quoting his predecessor Bob Pitofsky), 'restore the tradition of linking law enforcement with a continuing review of economic conditions to ensure that the laws make sense in light of contemporary competitive conditions'.... Pay attention to growing market concentration.... Business models are evolving... today, multisided business models intersect with other economic trends that include network effects, the aggregation of data, and vertical integration.... Antitrust enforcement protects competition, not just consumers.... Modern economic analysis is up to the challenge.... Congress gave the FTC broader enforcement tools than just the Sherman and Clayton Acts...
Let me highlight this once again: The very sharp Martin Wolf reacts to the Business Roundtable's recognition that it and the corporations of which it consists need to take on a much broader system-stabilization role. In my view, the first thing the Business Roundtable and its fellow travelers need to do is for them to recover control of the political right from the armies of political and media grifters. They need to weigh on on what right-wing politicians ought to stand for. So far they have not: Martin Wolf: Why Rigged Capitalism Is Damaging Liberal Democracy https://www.ft.com/content/5a8ab27e-d470-11e9-8367-807ebd53ab77: "Economies are not delivering for most citizens because of weak competition, feeble productivity growth and tax loopholes.... The US Business Roundtable, which represents the chief executives of 181 of the world’s largest companies, abandoned their longstanding view that 'corporations exist principally to serve their shareholders'.... What does—and should—[this] moment mean? The answer needs to start with acknowledgment of the fact that something has gone very wrong. Over the past four decades, and especially in the US, the most important country of all, we have observed an unholy trinity of slowing productivity growth, soaring inequality and huge financial shocks.... The economy [is] not delivering... in large part... [because of] the rise of rentier capitalism.... Market and political power allows privileged individuals and businesses to extract a great deal of such rent from everybody else.... If one listens to the political debates in many countries, notably the US and UK, one would conclude that the disappointment is mainly the fault of imports from China or low-wage immigrants, or both. Foreigners are ideal scapegoats. But the notion that rising inequality and slow productivity growth are due to foreigners is simply false.... Members of the Business Roundtable and their peers have tough questions to ask themselves. They are right: seeking to maximise shareholder value has proved a doubtful guide to managing corporations. But that realisation is the beginning, not the end.... We need a dynamic capitalist economy that gives everybody a justified belief that they can share in the benefits. What we increasingly seem to have instead is an unstable rentier capitalism, weakened competition, feeble productivity growth, high inequality and, not coincidentally, an increasingly degraded democracy. Fixing this is a challenge for us all, but especially for those who run the world’s most important businesses...
Matthew Martin: "It doesn't usually get spelled out this way https://twitter.com/hyperplanes/status/1125383936258052097, but the father of Clovis—the first french king—seems to have been a kind of Roman governor https://t.co/xfhgPnx3V0...
I wish to once again flag this: Recession Ready. We are not yet out of time to take steps to keep the next recession from turning into a depression. But the clock is ticking. Here is an issue are in which the sooner we take action, the better. And here we at Equitable Growth and the Hamilton Project have, I think, done a very good job: Equitable Growth: Recession Ready https://equitablegrowth.org/recession-ready-2/: "Economic recessions are inevitable and they are painful, with harsh short-term effects on families and businesses and potentially deep long-term impacts on the economy and society. But we can ameliorate some of the next recession’s worst effects and minimize its long-term costs if we adopt smart policies now that will be triggered when its first warning signs appear. Equitable Growth has joined forces with The Hamilton Project to advance a set of specific, evidence-based policy ideas for shortening and easing the impacts of the next recession...
*John Preskill *: Explains ‘Quantum Supremacy’ https://www.quantamagazine.org/john-preskill-explains-quantum-supremacy-20191002/: 'In the 2012 paper that introduced the term “quantum supremacy,” I wondered: “Is controlling large-scale quantum systems merely really, really hard, or is it ridiculously hard? In the former case we might succeed in building large-scale quantum computers after a few decades of very hard work. In the latter case we might not succeed for centuries, if ever.” The recent achievement by the Google team bolsters our confidence that quantum computing is merely really, really hard. If that’s true, a plethora of quantum technologies are likely to blossom in the decades ahead...
Scott Aaronson: Quantum Supremacy: The Gloves Are Off https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4372: 'does IBM’s analysis mean that “quantum supremacy” hasn’t been achieved? No, it doesn’t—at least, not under any definition of “quantum supremacy” that I’ve ever used. The Sycamore chip took about 3 minutes.... three minutes versus 2.5 days is still a quantum speedup by a factor of 1200. But even more relevant, I think, is to compare the number of “elementary operations.” Let’s generously count a FLOP (floating-point operation) as the equivalent of a quantum gate. Then by my estimate, we’re comparing ~5×10^9 quantum gates against ~2×10^20 FLOPs—a quantum speedup by a factor of ~40 billion.... The broader point is that neither party... denies that the top-supercomputers-on-the-planet-level difficulty of classically simulating Google’s 53-qubit programmable chip really is coming from the exponential character of the quantum states in that chip, and nothing else...
The Song Dynasty revolution: Doug Jones: A Cycle of Cathay https://logarithmichistory.wordpress.com/2019/10/20/a-cycle-of-cathay-2/: 'Jacques Gernet: "The innovations which make their appearance in East Asia round about the year 1000… form such a coherent and extensive whole that we have to yield to the evidence: at this period, the Chinese world experienced a real transformation.… The analogies [with the European Renaissance] are numerous–the return to the classical tradition, the diffusion of knowledge, the upsurge of science and technology (printing, explosives, advance in seafaring techniques, the clock with escapement…), a new philosophy, and a new view of the world.… There is not a single sector of political, social or economic life in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries which does not show evidence of radical changes in comparison with earlier ages. It is not simply a matter of a change of scale (increase in population, general expansion of production, development of internal and external trade) but of a change of character. Political habits, society, the relations between town and country, and economic patterns are quite different from what they had been.… A new world had been born...
Doug Jones: Empires and Barbarians https://logarithmichistory.wordpress.com/2019/10/20/empires-and-barbarians-5/: 'The fall of Rome involved the disintegration of the Roman state; the collapse of long-distance trade; the disappearance of mass-produced pottery, coinage, and monumental architecture over large areas; declining literacy among commoners and elites; great insecurity of life and property, and demographic collapse. The process was drawn out and played out differently in different regions. In the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, central government supported by taxation continued; in the West it largely disappeared. The nadir in the West was perhaps the tenth century. We might set the turning point at the battle of Lechfeld (955): a last set of invaders off the steppes, the Magyars, was defeated by the Emperor Otto, and then adopted Christianity, gave up nomadic marauding, and settled down as feudal lords in Hungary.... The overall trend of history is for more complex societies to replace less complex. (Important note: “more complex” is not the same as “nicer.”) But the process is an uneven one, in part because military effectiveness is only loosely coupled with social complexity...
I suspect that this will be to the taste of very few people who read this. But I think that this—and Marshall Berman's (1982) All That Is Solid Melts into Air http://books.google.com/?isbn=0860917851—is well worth your attention. One way to approach it is to note that back before 1500 humanity's collective technological and organizational possibilities grew at a proportion rate of something like 0.04% per year. Now they grow at 2% per year. Thus changes in what we can do and how we can organize ourselves to do it that used to happen over a 50-year timespan now take place in one revolution around the sun. Thus "modern" people must continually reinvent and reinvent ourselves in a way very foreign to all of the memory of our past historical experience. What are the consequences of this? Humanist late-twentieth century New York CUNY Marxist took a stab: Marshall Berman (1984): The Signs in the Street: A Response to Perry Anderson https://newleftreview.org/issues/I144/articles/marshall-berman-the-signs-in-the-street-a-response-to-perry-anderson: "‘To be modern’, as I define it... ‘is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one’s world in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air. To be a modernist is to make oneself somehow at home in this maelstrom... to grasp and confront the world that modernization makes, and to strive to make it our own.’ Modernism aims ‘to give modern men and women the power to change the world that is changing them, to make them the subjects as well as the objects of modernization.’ Anderson is willing to accept this as a vision of 19th-century culture and politics, but he thinks that it is irrelevant to our century, let alone to our day.... I could assail Anderson’s reading of modern and contemporary history in plenty of ways, but it wouldn’t do anything to advance our common understanding. I want to try something different. Anderson’s view of the current horizon is that it’s empty, closed; mine is that it’s open and crowded with creative possibilities. The best way to defend my vision might be to show what this horizon looks like, what’s actually out there as I see it.... A massive black woman gets on, bent under numerous parcels; I give her my seat. Just behind her, her fifteen-or-so-year-old daughter undulates up the aisle, radiant, stunning in the skin-tight pink pants she has just bought.... They continue an argument.... The mother still won’t look, but after awhile she lifts her eyes slowly, then shakes her head. ‘With that ass,’ she says, ‘you’ll never get out of high school without a baby. And I ain’t taking care of no more babies. You’re my last baby.’ The girl squeezes her mother’s arm: ‘Don’t worry, Mama. We’re modern. We know how to take care of ourselves.’ The mother sighs, and addresses her packages: ‘Modern? Just you take care you don’t bring me no modern babies.’ Soon I get off, feeling as happy and whole as the girl in the bus. Life is rough in the South Bronx, but the people aren’t giving up: modernity is alive and well...
As we hand more and more control over to agencies whee humans are not really in the loop, we are going to find lots of unintended and deleterious consequences. When the Sacklers sicked Purdue Pharma on the world to make themselves some money, did they imagine that it would decide that addicting lots of Americans to oxycontin was a strategy it would follow? Probably not. Corporations with diffused responsibility and everybody looking only at their narrow piece is one way to take humans out of the loop. Algorithmic systems are another: Kris Shaffer: How Algorithms Amplify Our Own Biases and Shape What We See Online https://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/algorithms-bias-internet: "The following is an excerpt from Kris Shaffer’s book, Data Versus Democracy: How Big Data Algorithms Shape Opinions and Alter the Course of History. It is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.... When a user performs a search, the model takes their search terms and any metadata around the search (location, timing, etc.) as inputs, along with data about the user from their profile and activity history, and other information from the platform’s database, like content features and the profiles and preferences of other similar users. Based on this data, the model delivers results—filtered and ranked content, according to predictions made about what the user is most likely to engage with...
This is absolutely brilliant, and quite surprising to me. I had imagined that most of discrimination in the aggregate was the result of a thumb placed lightly on the scale over and over and over again. Here Pat and Chris present evidence that, at least in employment, it is very different: that a relatively small proportion of employers really really discriminate massively, and that most follow race-neutral procedures and strategies: Patrick Kline and Christopher Walters: Audits as Evidence: Experiments, Ensembles, and Enforcement https://eml.berkeley.edu//~crwalters/papers/reasonable_doubt.pdf: "We develop tools for utilizing correspondence experiments to detect illegal discrimination by individual employers. Employers violate US employment law if their propensity to contact applicants depends on protected characteristics such as race or sex. We establish identification of higher moments of the causal effects of protected characteristics on callback rates as a function of the number of fictitious applications sent to each job ad. These moments are used to bound the fraction of jobs that illegally discriminate. Applying our results to three experimental datasets, we find evidence of significant employer heterogeneity in discriminatory behavior, with the standard deviation of gaps in job-specific callback probabilities across protected groups averaging roughly twice the mean gap. In a recent experiment manipulating racially distinctive names, we estimate that at least 85% of jobs that contact both of two white applications and neither of two black applications are engaged in illegal discrimination. To assess more carefully the tradeoff between type I and II errors presented by these behavioral patterns, we consider the performance of a series of decision rules for investigating suspicious callback behavior under a simple two-type model that rationalizes the experimental data. Though, in our preferred specification, only 17% of employers are estimated to discriminate on the basis of race, we find that an experiment sending 10 applications to each job would enable accurate detection of 7- 10% of discriminators while falsely accusing fewer than 0.2% of non-discriminators. A minimax decision rule acknowledging partial identification of the joint distribution of callback rates yields higher error rates but more investigations than our baseline two-type model. Our results suggest illegal labor market discrimination can be reliably monitored with relatively small modifications to existing audit designs...
Walter Jon Williams: Reviews Too Late: Money Heist http://www.walterjonwilliams.net/2019/10/reviews-too-late-money-heist/: 'While recovering from surgery I binged, mainly continuing my exploration of Spanish TV with Money Heist (Casa de Papel, “House of Paper”) I do like an intricate caper, as my Maijstral books demonstrate, and this is probably the longest caper ever filmed, something like sixteen hours of television originally split into two seasons. (One crime over two seasons!) The series was one of the most-watched in Europe last summer, which attracted the interest of Netflix. When Netflix acquired the series it was re-edited into 22 episodes, and two more seasons were filmed. (I’m halfway through Season Three, and Season Four has yet to be released.) So, whatta we got here? Master criminal El Professor (Álvaro Morte) recruits a group of criminal specialists to take over the Spanish mint, run off a couple billion euros over a week’s time, and cleverly vanish along with the cash. To preserve anonymity, each of the team adopts the pseudonym of a city, and the tale is narrated by Tokyo, a young woman with a history of robbing banks, and who recently watched her boyfriend gunned down when a heist she planned went terribly wrong. Tokyo isn’t an unreliable narrator, exactly, but she’s an unreliable human being, prone to making an impulsive grand gesture at exactly the wrong moment. And in fact El Professor turns out to have made quite a number of mistakes in casting his crime...
Voltaire: The Presbyterians https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/voltaire-the-works-of-voltaire-vol-xix-philosophical-letters: 'Though the Episcopal and Presbyterian sects are the two prevailing ones in Great Britain, yet all others are very welcome to come and settle in it, and they live very sociably together, though most of their preachers hate one another almost as cordially as a Jansenist damns a Jesuit. Take a view of the Royal Exchange in London, a place more venerable than many courts of justice, where the representatives of all nations meet for the benefit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian transact business together, as though they were all of the same religion, and give the name of Infidels to none but bankrupts; there the Presbyterian confides in the Anabaptist, and the Churchman depends upon the Quaker’s word. At the breaking up of this pacific and free assembly, some withdraw to the synagogue, and others to take a glass. This man goes and is baptized in a great tub, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; that man has his son’s foreskin cut off, and causes a set of Hebrew words—to the meaning of which he himself is an utter stranger—to be mumbled over the infant; others retire to their churches, and there wait the inspiration of heaven with their hats on; and all are satisfied. If one religion only were allowed in England, the government would very possibly become arbitrary; if there were but two, the people would cut one another’s throats; but, as there is such a multitude, they all live happy, and in peace...
Ian Dunt: "Catherine McKinnell https://twitter.com/IanDunt/status/1186640891966115840: 'Every member in this House represents people who voted Leave and Remain. What nobody voted for was a wing and prayer, cake and eat it, blindfold Brexit with no impact assessments on the biggest transformation of our economy in peacetime history...
The fall of the Roman Empire in the west: implications for literature and literary culture: Erich Auerbach: Mimesis: 'Gregory of Tours: "Serious local fighting arose at that time between inhabitants of the region of Tours. For Sicharius, son of the late John, celebrated the feast of the Nativity of Our Lord at the village of Manthelan with Austrighiselus and the other neighbors. And the priest of the place sent a boy over to invite some of the men to come to his house for a drink. When the boy got there, one of those he invited drew his sword and did not refrain from striking at him. He fell down and was dead. Sicharius was friendly with the priest, and when he heard that one of his boys had been murdered, he took his arms and went to the church to wait for Austrighiselus...
Justin August: Upgrading to OSX Catalina as an Anaconda User https://medium.com/@justinaugust/upgrading-to-osx-catalina-as-an-anaconda-user-2e71db194764: 'Big news! There’s a new MacOS out! It brings lots of nice features. Bad news! If you’re a user of the Anaconda distribution for Python, Data Analysis and Jupyter Notebooks you may want to wait. Installing Catalina will disable your Anaconda distribution and move the folder from your root directory to a folder on your desktop called Relocated Items. More details can be found here. My steps for correcting this were...
Alwyn Young (1994): The Tyranny of Numbers: Confronting the Statistical Realities of the East Asian Growth Experience https://www.nber.org/papers/w4680: 'The fundamental role played by factor accumulation in explaining the extraordinary postwar growth of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan.... While the growth of output per capita in these economies has averaged 6% to 7% per annum over the past two and a half decades, the growth of output per effective worker in the non-agricultural sector of these economies has been only 3% to 4% per annum.... Total factor productivity growth rates... are well within the bounds of those experienced by the OECD and Latin American economies over equally long periods of time. While the growth of output and manufacturing exports in the newly industrializing economies of East Asia is virtually unprecedented, the growth of total factor productivity in these economies is not...
Phoebe Weston: Ancestral Home of All Human Beings Discovered https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/homo-sapiens-origin-humans-botswana-zambezi-river-a9174396.html: 'Vast wetland south of Zambezi river was cradle of all mankind and sustained our ancestors for 70,000 years: Scientists have pinpointed a fertile river valley in northern Botswana as the ancestral home of all human beings: The earliest anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) arose 200,000 years ago in a vast wetland south of the Zambezi river which was the cradle of all mankind, a new study has revealed. This lush region–which also covered parts of Namibia and Zimbabwe – was home to an enormous lake which sustained our ancestors for 70,000 years, according to the paper published in the journal Nature. Between 110,000 and 130,000 years ago, the climate started to change and fertile corridors opened up out of this valley. For the first time, the population began to disperse–paving the way for modern humans to migrate out of Africa, and ultimately, across the world...
But... But... But... There are no hot summer nights in Sausalito!: Wikipedia: Sausalito Summernight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sausalito_Summernight...
Gary Forsythe: A Critical History of Early Rome: 'By 264 B.C. peninsular Italy was firmly under Roman military control. Its population consisted of three different categories of people. First of all, there were the Roman citizens. They occupied the actual territory of the Roman state, which stretched across central Italy from the Tyrrhenian to the Adriatic, extended southward in a strip down along the Volscian coast to the Bay of Naples, and included northern Campania. According to Roman census figures, which seem to be credible from the early third century B.C. onwards, the adult male Roman population at this time numbered more than a quarter of a million. Secondly, there were the states allied to Rome. In geography and population they formed the largest of the three categories. They were the various Etruscan, Umbrian, Picene, Sabellian, Messapic, and Greek communities of northern and southern Italy, who still exercised local autonomy over their own affairs but were bound to Rome by individual bilateral treaties. Generally speaking, these states were governed by republican constitutions of various configurations, and political power was largely in the hands of local landed elites, who had the same basic social, economic, and political interests and outlook as the Roman aristocracy. The third category of people in Roman Italy were the Latin colonies scattered throughout the peninsula. Since their inhabitants enjoyed Latin status and had Rome as their mother-city, they were closely bound to the Roman state by law, language, culture, and sentiment. Though numerically the smallest of the three categories, their numbers were deployed geographically to best safeguard Roman interests in the lands of the allied communities. Rome held the commanding central position of this legal structure, which integrated all these peoples into a single military organization. Both the Italian allies and the Latin colonies were bound directly to Rome by individual treaties which spelled out their rights and obligations. As long as domestic tranquillity was maintained, Rome was content to allow the allied...
There is no single effect of "automation" on the workforce and the labor market. It is long past time for us to dig deeper, and here is a good piece of spadework: Sotiris Blanas, Gino Gancia, and Tim Lee: How Different Technologies Affect Different Workers https://voxeu.org/article/how-different-technologies-affect-different-workers_: "Since the early 1980s, technology has reduced the demand for low and medium-skill workers, the young, and women, especially in manufacturing industries. The column investigates which technologies have had the largest effect, and on which types of worker. It finds that robots and software raised the demand for high-skill workers, older workers, and men, especially in service industries.... From 1982 to 2005, using data from 30 industries spanning roughly the entire economies of ten high-income countries.... We used the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) and the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) to evaluate which jobs are more prone to automation based on the type of tasks they require.... Industrial robots decrease low-skill employment, while they increase the income shares of high and medium-skill workers, old workers, and men.... In manufacturing, robots lower low-skill, young, and female employment, while in services, they increase medium-skill and male employment. In both sectors, robots increase the income shares of high-skill, old, and male workers. Our results are consistent with the view that robots replace workers who perform routine tasks, especially in sectors where automation is more widespread, such as manufacturing. By contrast, they increase employment and incomes in sectors where automation has started more recently, such as in services, a sector in which new occupations are appearing. Given the industrial and occupational composition of these sectors, that robots are likely to complement engineers, product designers and managers–that is, occupations that are dominated by high-skill, more senior, and male workers. Software has a similar effect to robots, whereas ICT capital is associated with employment gains mostly for medium and low-skill workers...
I have some disagreements with this by the smart Sufi, Mishkin, and Hooper: the evidence for "significant nonlinearity" in the Phillips Curve is that the curve flattens when inflation is low, not that it steepens when labor slack is low. There is simply no "strong evidence" of significant steepening with low labor slack. Yes, you can find specifications with a t-statistic of 2 in which this is the case, but you have to work hard to find such specifications, and your results are fragile. The fact is that in the United States between 1957 and 1988—the first half of the last 60 years—the slope of the simplest-possible adaptive-expectations Phillips Curve was -0.54: each one-percentage point fall in unemployment below the estimated natural rate boosted inflation in the subsequent year by 0.54%-points above its contemporary value. Since 1988—in the second half of the past 60 years—the slope of this simplest-possible Phillips curve has been effectively zero: the estimated regression coefficient has been not -0.54 but only -0.03. The most important observations driving the estimated negative slope of the Phillips Curve in the first half of the past sixty years were 1966, 1973, and 1974—inflation jumping up in times of relatively-low unemployment—and 1975, 1981, and 1982—inflation falling in times of relatively-high unemployment. The most important observations driving the estimated zero slope of the Phillips Curve in the second half of the past sixty years have been 2009-2014: the failure of inflation to fall as the economy took its Great-Recession excursion to a high-unemployment labor market with enormous slack. Yes, if we had analogues of (a) two presidents, Johnson and Nixon, desperate for a persistent high-pressure economy; (b) a Federal Reserve chair like Arthur Burns eager to accommodate presidential demands; (c) the rise of a global monopoly in the economy's key input able to deliver mammoth supply shocks; and (d) a decade of bad luck; then we might see a return to inflation as it was in the (pre-Iran crisis) early and mid-1970s. But is that really the tail risk we should be focused monomaniacally on? And how is it, exactly, that "the difference between national and city/state results in recent decades can be explained by the success that monetary policy has had in quelling inflation and anchoring inflation expectations since the 1980s"? Neither of those two should affect the estimated coefficient. Much more likely is simply that—at the national level and at the city/state level—the Phillips Curve becomes flat when inflation becomes low: Peter Hooper, Frederic S. Mishkin, and Amir Sufi: Prospects for Inflation in a High Pressure Economy: Is the Phillips Curve Dead or Is It Just Hibernating? https://delong.typepad.com/files/phillips-hibernating-1.pdf: "Evidence on whether the Phillips curve is dead, i.e. that its slope has flattened to zero. National data going back to the 1950s and 60s yield strong evidence of negative slopes and significant nonlinearity in those slopes, with slopes much steeper in tight labor markets than in easy labor markets. This evidence of both slope and nonlinearity weakens dramatically based on macro data since the 1980s for the price Phillips curve, but not the wage Phillips curve. However, the endogeneity of monetary policy and the lack of variation of the unemployment gap, which has few episodes of being substantially below zero in this sample period, makes the price Phillips curve estimates from this period less reliable. At the same time, state level and MSA level data since the 1980s yield significant evidence of both negative slope and nonlinearity in the Phillips curve. The difference between national and city/state results in recent decades can be explained by the success that monetary policy has had in quelling inflation and anchoring inflation expectations since the 1980s. We also review the experience of the 1960s, the last time inflation expectations became unanchored, and observe both parallels and differences with today. Our analysis suggests that reports of the death of the Phillips curve may be greatly exaggerated...
Carmen Ye: Why We Need Better Re-Employment Policies For Formerly Incarcerated African American Men: "African American men... 33 percent of the 1.56 million Americans held in state or federal prisons.... When these men are released from prison, what will their employment prospects look like?... Black applicants with no criminal record receive a callback or job offer at the same rate as white applicants with a felony conviction. Yet black applicants without a criminal record were three times as likely to get a callback as those with a record...
IMHO, the late Marty Weitzman's finest work. I would give a testicle or equivalent value to have written this: Marty Weitzman: Prices vs. Quantities https://delong.typepad.com/prices-vs-quantities.pdf: "There is, it seems to me, a rather fundamental reason to believe that quantities are better signals for situations demanding a high degree of coordination. A classical example would be the short run production planning of intermediate industrial materials. Within a large production organization, be it the General Motors Corporation or the Soviet industrial sector as a whole, the need for balancing the output of any intermediate commodity whose production is relatively specialized to this organization and which cannot be effortlessly and instantaneously imported from or exported to a perfectly competitive outside world puts a kink in the benefit function. If it turns out that production of ball bearings of a certain specialized kind (plus reserves) falls short of anticipated internal consumption, far more than the value of the unproduced bearings can be lost. Factors of production and materials that were destined to be combined with the ball bearings and with commodities containing them in higher stages of production must stand idle and are prevented from adding value all along the line. If on the other hand more bearings are produced than were contemplated being consumed, the excess cannot be used immediately and will only go into storage to lose implicit interest over time. Such short run rigidity is essentially due to the limited substitutability, fixed coefficients nature of a technology based on machinery. Other things being equal, the asymmetry between the effects of overproducing and underproducing are more pronounced the further removed from final use is the commodity and the more difficult it is to substitute alternative slack resources or to quickly replenish supplies by emergency imports. The resulting strong curvature in benefits around the planned consumption levels of intermediate materials tends to create a very high comparative advantage for quantity instruments. If this is combined with a cost function that is nearly linear in the relevant range, the advantage of the quantity mode is doubly compounded...
Comment of the Day: Grizzled in Age of the Expert as Policymaker Is Coming To an End https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/comment-of-the-day-_grizzled_-in-age-of-the-expert-as-policymaker-is-coming-to-an-end-alas-i-dont-think-its-usual.html: 'Alas, I don't think it's usually possible for non-experts to evaluate expert judgements. The Reinhard and Rogoff example is more the exception than the rule. Consider the case of global warming. Google 'Conversion of a Global Warming Skeptic'. This is a case where is took 18 months of work, which was funded so it could be not only full time but assisted, for a Phd in physics to accumulate enough background to become convinced that the climate scientists had been right all along...
Comment of the Day: Nils in Santa Ana Winds https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/comment-of-the-day-_nils_-in-santa-ana-winds-ni-can-reliably-tell-you-that-there-was-a-diablo-wind-on-october-19-and-2.html: 'I can reliably tell you that there was a Diablo wind on October 19 and 20, 1991...
Comment of the Day: Dilbert Dogbert in Santa Ana Winds https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/comment-of-the-day-_dilbert-dogbert_-in-santa-ana-winds-back-in-the-mid-50s-i-spent-time-with-my-older-brother-in-sa.html: 'Back in the mid 50's I spent time with my older brother in San Bernadino. His house was near the El Cajon Pass...
Comment of the Day: Adrian: The 1600 Military Revolution and the Islamic World https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/adrian-_the-1600-military-revolution-and-the-islamic-world_-since-the-turn-of-the-millennium-there-has-been-a-fast-de.html: 'State of the art is the idea of a Eurasian rather than European gunpowder revolution. But there is still perhaps something different emerging in C17th century Europe. In 1500 the Ottomans are the cutting edge by 1700 they look old fashioned...
Hoisted from the Archives: From Eight Years Ago: The Way the World Looked to Me in the Summer of 2011 https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/hoisted-from-the-archives-from-eight-years-ago-how-should-obama-answer-the-stock-markets-wake-up-call.html: 'Back in the summer of 2009, Barack Obama had five economic policy principals on the Treasury Bench...
Hoisted from the Archives: Ricardo's Big Idea, and Its Vicissitudes https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/hoisted-from-the-archives-_httpswwwbradford-delongcom201710ricardos-big-idea-and-its-vicissitudes-inet-edinbu.html: 'A problem for Ricardo: The LTV tells him that capitalist production should take place according to absolute advantage, with those living in countries with no absolute advantage left in subsistence agriculture.The doctrine of comparative advantage is Ricardo’s way out. For him, the LTV holds within countries. Countries’ overall price levels relative to each other rise and fall as a result of specie flows until trade balances. And what is left is international commodity price differentials that follow comparative advantage. Merchants profit from these differentials, and their demand induces specialization...
Hoisted from the Archives: _Orlando Letelier (1976): The ‘Chicago Boys’ in Chile: Economic Freedom’s Awful Toll: _ https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/orlando-letelier-1976-the-chicago-boys-in-chile-economic-freedoms-awful-toll-hoisted-from-the-archives.html: 'It is nonsensical... that those who inspire, support or finance that economic policy should try to present their advocacy as restricted to “technical consid erations,” while pretending to reject the system of terror it requires to succeed...
Hoisted from the Archives: Contra Raghu Rajan: Economic Stimulus Has Not Failed, It Has Not Been Tried (on a Large Enough Scale) https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/contra-raghu-rajan-economic-stimulus-has-not-failed-it-has-not-been-tried-on-a-large-enough-scale.html: 'Back in 2007 I would have said that every macroeconomist who has done any homework at all believes that coordinated monetary and fiscal expansion together increase at least the flow of nominal GDP. Now comes the very smart Raghu Rajan to say, apparently, not so...
Weekend Reading: Benjamin Wittes: The Collapse of the President’s Defense https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/benjamin-wittes-the-collapse-of-the-presidents-defense-weekend-reading.html: 'It was never a strong defense. After all, Trump himself released the smoking gun early in L’Affaire Ukrainienne when the White House published its memo of Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. That document erased any question as to whether Trump had asked a foreign head of state to “investigate”—a euphemism for digging up dirt on—his political opponents. There was no longer any doubt that he had asked a foreign country to violate the civil liberties of American citizens by way of interfering in the coming presidential campaign. That much we have known for certain for weeks. The clarity of the evidence did not stop the president’s allies from trying to fashion some semblance of defense. But the past few days of damaging testimony have stripped away the remaining fig leaves...
Weekend Reading: Milton Friedman (1982): Free Markets and the Generals https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/milton-friedman-1982-free-markets-and-the-generals-weekend-reading.html: 'Military juntas in other South American countries have been as authoritarian in the economic sphere as they have been in politics.... None, with the exception of Chile, has supported a fully free market economy as a matter of principle. Chile is an economic miracle. Inflation has been cut from 700% a year in mid-1974 to less than 10% a year. After a difficult transition, the economy boomed, growing an aver age of about 8% a year from 1976 to 1980. Real wages and employment rose rapidly and unemployment fell. Imports and exports surged after export subsidies were eliminated and tariffs were slashed to a flat 10% (except for temporarily higher rates for most automobiles)...
Note to Self: Industrial Policy in Korea: Readings https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/note-to-self-industrial-policy-in-korea-readings-alice-amsden-1989-_asias-next-giant_-chs-1-6-nathan.html...
Worthy Reads: from October 25, 2018 https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/10/fifteen-worthy-reads-for-october-25-2018.html...
#noted #weblogs #2019-10-31
